Boycott the Hajj

WASHINGTON — Earlier this month, a petite woman with straight, blonde hair slipped quietly against a wall, unfurling a pink banner just outside the elevators on the lower level of the Ritz-Carlton. She was dwarfed by men walking by, clad in Western suits and thawb-and-keffiyeh — or gown and headdress — for the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, a conference of U.S. and Saudi business and government leaders, sponsored in part by the U.S. Commerce Department and the Saudi-American Business Council.

“Obama! Don’t meet with the war criminals! Don’t do business with the bloody Saudi monarchy!” she shouted, a calm in her voice.

Guards swooped the activist, Medea Benjamin, up by her elbows, her feet dangling in air, and swept her up the stairs, to plonk her out on the sidewalk — but not before Benjamin, co-founder of the activist group, Code Pink, had made her point: The world needs to boycott Saudi Arabia for its “callous disregard for human lives.”

This past week’s bloody carnage of 717 pilgrims killed in a stampede during the hajj, the holiest Muslim pilgrimage, with another 863 people injured, brought home the message of the protest.

* * *

A secular Muslim feminist, born in India in 1965 and raised in the U.S., I started pondering the question of Saudi Arabia 12 years ago when I went on the hajj in the winter of 2003 with my family. When we landed, handing our passports to Saudi authorities, I realized that we had stepped back in time, surrendering fundamental human rights, while passing symbols of 21st-century economic progress, from a billboard for Ikea to the Sheraton Makkah Hotel & Towers where my family stayed, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, where my mother surreptitiously bought a meal for her grandson while my father — her official male chaperone — was busy elsewhere.

“To go,” she told the KFC clerk, her eyes scanning the crowds for the mutawwa’in, or “religious police.”

I have come to believe that Muslims should boycott the hajj and that the world should boycott the government of Saudi Arabia, like it did the apartheid government of South Africa, until the House of Saud brings democracy, civil society, human rights — including women’s rights — and a peaceful and tolerant interpretation of Islam to its people and the world.

We should be emboldened by a growing chorus of people who are raising their voices to protest the tyrannical Saudi regime that has wreaked havoc on the world since 1979, burdening our generation with the curse of its extremist brand of sectarian, intolerant Islam.

We are fed up.

* * *

Frustration has been building up for years — fomented with the fact that so many of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi — but it snapped this year, with a number of events: barbaric images of ISIL fighters beheading hostages, raping sex slaves, burning Muslims and slaughtering Christians, as they practiced Saudi theology on steroids; the Saudi imprisonment of activists like Raif Badawi, a blogger sentenced to lashes and jail for “apostasy,” and Mohammed al-Nimr, a young Saudi member of the minority Shia sect, sentenced to crucifixion for “waging war on God”; the Saudi refusal — along with other Gulf countries — to accept Syrian refugees; and the reckless perishing of pilgrims in the stampede last week.

With the death of Saudi leader Abdullah this past January, replaced by heir King Salman, Malaysian-American singer and songwriter Ani Zonneveld, executive director of Muslims for Progressive Values, published an “Open Letter to King Salman,” arguing that “Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi ideology is the root of all the ills in the Muslim world,” and appealing for reform. She heard back from no one in the royal empire.

Around the same time, Saudi blogger Badawi’s courageous wife, Ensaf Haidar, traveled through the European Union, the U.S. and Canada to raise awareness for her husband’s case. In an interview, she pleads for folks to “stay by my side” until her husband, her “darling,” as she calls him, is released.

This past May, amidst Saudi meddling in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, along with the continued jailing of Badawai, Amnesty International sponsored a protest in front of the Saudi Embassy in Berlin. Calling Saudi Arabia “one of the most repressive regimes in the world,” the Campaign against Arms Trade protested U.K. military sales to Saudi Arabia, which spent about $80 billion in weapon expenditures last year, making it the fourth-largest military budget in the world, after the U.S., China and Russia.

By early September, on the eve of King Salman’s visit to the U.S. to meet with President Obama, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman published a column, “Our Radical Islamic BFF, Saudi Arabia,” asserting, brilliantly: “Nothing has been more corrosive to the stability and modernization of the Arab world, and the Muslim world at large, than the billions and billions of dollars the Saudis have invested since the 1970s into wiping out the pluralism of Islam — the Sufi, moderate Sunni and Shiite versions — and imposing in its place the puritanical, anti-modern, anti-women, anti-Western, anti-pluralistic Wahhabi Salafist brand of Islam promoted by the Saudi religious establishment.”

What is troubling is that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its various proxies, fund, orchestrate and manipulate a campaign to level allegations of “Islamophobia” against those of us who discuss the dangers of political Islam, Islamic extremism and Saudi theology, in particular. But voices are speaking out. David Keyes, executive director of Advancing Human Rights, in an op-ed early last week published on Women in the World, a web-venture with the New York Times, asked bluntly, “Why do we tolerate the sins of the Saudis?”

The Code Pink activist, Benjamin, penned a column last week for the Huffington Post, “10 reasons to oppose the Saudi monarchy,” of which highlights included: spending $4 billion a year on mosques, madrassas, preachers, students and textbooks to spread its theology over the last 35 years; and being the “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups,” according to a 2009 cable by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

With the news of the pilgrimage stampede, many Muslims also have had enough. Parvez Sharma, director of a new film, “A Sinner in Mecca” — about his pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia as a gay man, punishable by execution in Saudi Arabia — falls short of calling for a boycott, but says, “It is time that the corrupt and unholy monarchy of Saudi Arabia and their Wahhabi masters are held accountable.”

“The horrors of the hajj this year are evidence,” he continues. “My new film, ‘A Sinner in Mecca,’ is proof. It is time that Muslims around the world questioned the savage edicts of the House of al-Saud that carries out lashings and beheadings with impunity and disregards the welfare of the millions of pilgrims who seek spiritual shelter in their kingdom. In my opinion the blame for much of what is wrong with the modern hajj lies squarely with the Saudi king who dares to call himself ‘the custodian of the two holy mosques.’”

Others like Raheel Raza, president of Muslims for Tomorrow, a nonprofit based in Toronto, are already boycotting the hajj. “I will not go to Saudi Arabia for the hajj — or any other reason — unless it rulers shape up their human rights record. And I ask all Muslims to boycott them as well. Saudis have single handedly destroyed our spiritual heritage and are now engaged in destroying human beings.”

And Melody Moezzi, author of “The War on Error,” about American Muslims, says, “Until the Saudi regime is gone, I’m not setting foot in Saudi. The Saudi regime never should’ve been allowed to own or run anything — not a country, not a pilgrimage, not Mecca, not Medina, not a street, not a tunnel, not a grain of sand.”

* * *

As news broke of the tragic stampede in Saudi Arabia, the Los Angeles Times splashed a headline across its pages of a Saudi prince arrested by police for allegedly forcing women workers to give him oral sex in his palatial Los Angeles mansion, one woman attempting to scale a fence to escape the “prince,” traumatized and bloodied.

It is time for the world’s businesses, governments, civil society activists and ordinary citizens to hold the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to account for its wanton disregard of human rights, so we can begin to remove the curse of the extremist, unjust and sexist theology that the House of Saud has brought into the world and move toward peace, human rights and dignity.

Thank you for reading this opinion which comes after serious reflection and meditation. The greatest expression of faith in any religion is not realizing a “pillar” of external ritual but respect and dignity for human life.

Posted on 9/28/15 | 11:38 PM CET

Ibn Atha

@Yusuf, her target might be difficult to achieve but she is not delusional. Saudi need to reform itself and stop propagating wahabism around the world

Posted on 9/28/15 | 11:44 PM CET

Milton38

Why?
I assume those are rhetorical questions.
They, the Saudi regime and its spiritual Jinns, coerce by force a certain political view. In most western countries this is done less coercive, but just as effectively, by the press.
They, the Saudis, manufacture consent by terror; the other, mainly democratic, countries by enforcing political correct views. If not obeyed they in the West destroy your life just as surely as the Saudis.
Nothing new – the poet Milton already reflected on this.

Posted on 9/29/15 | 7:55 AM CET

nak

Just because someone is a journalist and author of a book doesn’t give the right to tell all Muslims in the world to boycott the fifth pillar of Islam because of political reasons whatever it may be. Did not the USA make a fake weapons of mass destruction case and bomb and mass murder Iraqis? Where did your dignity and concern for human rights go then when you saw corpses of children piling up in Baghdad. You should go to Switzerland and make this claim, not sitting in USA. Boycott your country first before telling to boycott someone else.

Thank you @Ibn Atha for recognizing that we are only complicit, as Ani Zonneveld also told me, if we contribute to the economy of a regime that denied its citizens basic human rights and exported to the world a violent ideology of Islam.

Asra Nomani

@TruthNotMedia: Who is lesbian here? I’m not. But if I were that would give even more credibility to my argument to boycott a country that criminalizes gays and lesbians and executes them. I certainly hope you wouldn’t support the execution of people because of their sexuality.

Posted on 10/1/15 | 7:03 AM CET

SS

I used to support you, but now I feel like you’ve started to use your fame to make ludicrous manifestos about Islam. I went to Hajj this year. My husband barely skated the stampede. Do I think that the Saudis are a terrible, despotic, awful government? Absolutely. Is Hajj terribly mismanaged by the Saudis? No doubt.

But there is no denying that Hajj is a requirement for Muslims. You say that, ” The greatest expression of faith in any religion is not realizing a “pillar” of external ritual but respect and dignity for human life.” How are people who go on hajj not respecting human life? We helped so many people suffering from heat stroke with water, medical supplies, etc. We gave money and supplies to the struggling. I saw so many poor, destitute, elderly people from war zones around every corner of the world who saved their whole lives to embark on this sacred journey and to be close to the prophet’s mosque and the Kabah. No matter who runs hajj, there is no denying its holiness and blessings in Islam. You telling all Muslims to boycott it is just plain offensive, and is at complete odds with the sanctity of Hajj. You don’t understand how many people across the world struggle to make this journey despite all odds. Telling them to flat out boycott it is just ludicrous. Also, last time I checked you were not an Islamic scholar, and your idea of “the greatest expression of faith” might have a lot to do with your Western liberal values and less to do with Islam.

Perhaps it would be more productive and far less offensive to join voices with those who call for international control over the holy sites as opposed to exclusive Saudi control.

Also, it pains me to write this but when you first wrote your book about gender equity in mosques I was so proud of you. I was a very young woman at the time and I saw so much truth in your words. Now I feel like you have sold out to the media. I’m so disappointed in who you have become. You make these broad-brushed statements about Muslims, Islam, and Muslim women from this position of total self-righteousness. I find you now to be just as offensive as the bigoted, sexist Imams in our community.

And make no mistake about me. I am not a sexually repressed Muslim female peon, as you paint many Muslim women to be. I am a Muslim civil rights lawyer and I do impact litigation on issues affecting the poor in the United States. So please don’t make any assumptions about me if you do choose to respond.

Posted on 10/1/15 | 4:51 PM CET

non arab muslim

Saudis are hypocrites. Repressive regime in saudia but the royal family does the opposite in Europe and America. Racist to the core like the rest of the GCC countries. We cant going to haj from the USA without spending 6 thousand per head and then getting treated like garbage because we are not white or Arab. I have to add that Indian muslims are so delusional believing themselves to be of Arab descent. The worst part is to be treated like dirt becaue you are not white or an Arab.

Lets get real. The whole world wants to move to western country because we get self respect, rights you name it that we they dont get in any muslim country.